The German city of Hamburg will soon be getting one of the biggest Apple Stores in the world. Construction isn't complete yet, and a group of people calling themselves the '.WAV Collective' decided it was time for a practical joke. Posing as construction workers, they planted an interesting logo on the store's facade. In broad daylight. And they videotaped it.

Yes, but, as mentioned, you probably wouldn't call the Linux kernel a "Red Hat Project" just because they contribute with funding and developers. ;-)

Yup, and I also have used KHTML in KDE 3.5, before it was turned into Webkit. Frankly, since Apple has added fundings and developers, the project has gone a very long way. Sure, Apple owes a lot to KHTML developers, but they also have brought some serious contribution on the table.

Not contending that at all, but that does not make Webkit an "Apple Project" in the same way the Linux kernel is no single organization's, however large a contribution it may have made to the kernel's development.

I don't know much about Haskell. I know that it's a language with an unusual syntax (for someone coming from the imperative world) that is pretty good for implementing recursion-based algorithms, but I don't know how much traction it actually has, as an example.

The traction isn't really as much a point (though it is gaining in real-world use lately), as the language is mainly a research language. Haskell has a huge influence on other languages nowadays. What I was aiming at was the fact that Microsoft lets a university professor do research with full-time funding with no obligations, and to publish his work under a no-frills license (BSD). This is clearly Microsoft paying for the development of OSS.

While I agree that standardization is good for the language, I have no knowledge of Microsoft really putting a lot of weight behind the Mono project.

And I certainly didn't mean to suggest they were (they aren't), but that their registering their efforts with the ECMA allows for others to build the Mono platform. Again, a standard developed at Microsoft, free to copy (yes, I know...conspiracy about a possible lock-in abounds -- legal basis, please, anyone?).

To me, it was rather like Wine or ReactOS : the NT API is publicly known, but the projects both remain hackish reimplementations that would be patent-trolled to death by MS from the moment where they'd start to go harm their business.

Most likely not, because there's no money to be made from suing -- who would you sue? 3 guys working in their spare time? Cedega? For, what, $3000 a head?

See Java and the JVM : they're all quite standard, yet Oracle has gone amok against Dalvik...

Yup -- my point entirely, since Google is a somewhat bigger target than the Wine and ReactOS developers. Patent trolling is a financial game -- the tech world's version of derivatives. ;-)

I definitely think that Sun has done much more for the open-source world than Apple and Microsoft combined.

They have indeed, which leaves them...gone. Business is evolution by natural selection without the stemming factors of tribalism and selective altruism. Innovation is largely irrelevant -- "products" (plastic) rule our world.

My Amiga 500 still boots from a floppy, the same floppy I used to boot it in 1987, and my Amiga 1200 boots in 2 seconds from a PCMCIA card. My latest laptop, which cpu is roughly 500 times faster, boots in about 30 seconds because I know how to tune my kernel.

If you think 30 seconds for a Linux kernel is fast, I'd actually argue that you don't know how to tune your kernel. Sub 20 second boot times with a custom built kernel are pretty achievable.

Uh...you might ask from when I start the clock before you assume I am trying to appear special: cold boot, from before my BIOS posts. Also, you might like to ask which init script I'm running and from what I/O device.

But I digress...

The point was (obviously) a different one than the 30 (or 20) second boot time, but that a computer with an order or two faster cpu and ditto I/O (and specifically 8000 times as much RAM) because of design still doesn't appear faster.

This is what an end user sees, technical jerk-off attitudes of OSNews readers aside, and no amount of fine tuning (except perhaps a 24-channel SSD raid) will bring my Linux box to boot as fast as my Amiga 1200, period.